Profound glenc - I would say the night sky as a whole is our biggest natural wonder. In fact, it should be protected much in the same way our parks and forrests are protected.
Imagine how much energy, greenhouse gas, carbon whozeewhatsits would be saved if we, as a civilization, just had that much more respect for the night sky. (start light pollution debate here...)
I love to sit outside when the center of the galaxy is pretty well direct overhead and just take it in... I never get tired of trying to get photos of it either.
Profound glenc - I would say the night sky as a whole is our biggest natural wonder. In fact, it should be protected much in the same way our parks and forrests are protected.
Imagine how much energy, greenhouse gas, carbon whozeewhatsits would be saved if we, as a civilization, just had that much more respect for the night sky. (start light pollution debate here...)
Hi astrojase,On the subject of natural wonders check this out
Absolutely brilliant...this text taken from the link you supplied... ["Through the initiatives of the Mackenzie District Council most of the required regulatory ordinances that might be required for such a status are already in place...
All Tekapo streets lights are sodium and shielded from above to reduce the glow and all household lights must face down - not up."]
Now there is a council that I would re-elect everytime!!! Smart people, perhaps some local councils in Australia can take a leaf out of our trans-tasman buddies book.
That is why I said the whole sky glenc, lol. But technically speaking, apart from other galaxies, the whole sky is everything in the Milky Way anyway, so we both agree on the same thing (am I arguing with myself?)...
The bright star at the top of the attached image is 3 Sgr (mag 4.6) and the nebula at the bottom is Sharpless 2-16.
The middle of the Milky Way is up and to the right of Sh2-16. This image is from http://www.sky-map.org/
The Milky Way isn't "ours".
We don't own it, we can't claim it, buy or sell it, can't "go there" and we can't even make any use of it.
And we're probably not the sole inhabitants of this galaxy, or the first...
You can say most of that about the Great Barrier Reef and Uluru too.
We can go to the MW, we are in it and we can encourage people to look at it, make it a tourist attraction.
We can go there with our telescopes. The Milky Way is "best" seen from 6 countries, one of them is Australia.
Five other countries lie under the center of the MW; Chile, Argentina, Brazil, South Africa and Lesotho.
Also different cultures have different attitudes to "ownership".
The outside edge of the Milky Way is about 4.3 degrees to the right of beta Tauri (Elnath) at 1am DST. It is on the left of the mid point between M35 and M37. If you travel 20,000 light years in that direction you will leave our galaxy. The attached SkyMapPro map labels it 180.
for the rest of the masses look what they are missing out on
now that looks beautiful 
